Peter Carey Quotes

To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.

People do not love those whose eyes show that they are somewhere else

The declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.

I have never begun a novel which wasn't going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before.

I'm interested in where we are, where we're going, where we've come from.

Swimming always cleans your soul

It's like standing on the edge of a cliff. This is especially true of the first draft. Every day you're making up the earth you're going to stand on.

Good writing of course requires talent, and no one can teach you to have talent.

I'm always the one with the activist friends. I've been an activist very little.

Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it's pain. Pain concerning the past.

My greatest pleasure is to invent. My continual mad ambition is to make something true and beautiful that never existed in the world before.

I did not know that history is like a blood stain that keeps on showing on the wall no matter how many new owners take possession, no matter how many times we pint over it.

I think that thing about the destruction of the world is there all the time, it's there every day when we look out the window.

I don't need new boots I got bluchers back down home. Eff the effing bluchers I'll buy you new adjectival effing elastic sided boots.

I don't think you have the right to shout about other people's private life.

All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure.

I never base characters on real people. There are people who do that but I really don't know how to do it.

Writers, at least writers of fiction, are always full of anxiety and worry.

Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It's not really any very heady fame.

Then I fell in love and everything went to hell.

And it's always possible that you will not get a nice review. So - and that's enraging of course, to get a bad review, you can't talk back, and it's sort of shaming in a way.

I don't separate my books into historical novels and the rest. To me, they're all made-up worlds, and both kinds are borne out of curiosity, some investigation into the past.

One has to be able to twist and change and distort characters, play with them like clay, so everything fits together. Real people don't permit you to do that.

Writers are always envious, mean-minded, filled with rage and envyat other's good fortune. There is nothing like the failure of a close friend to cheer us up.

So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.

You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel.

She did not begin to tell real lies until Rosa was in hospital suffering that filthy rot that left her all eaten out inside, as light and fragile as a pine log infested with white ant